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How to improve your UX strategy

Are you being disrupted? How do you defend against disruption? How do you become a disruptor? In our latest whitepaper, Journeys with Unicorns: Excellence in User Experience we tackle these questions. By focusing on six Unicorn Club companies including Uber, Pinterest, Slack, WeWork, Airbnb, and Spotify, we share some of the magic that makes them scale quickly.

Leading disruptors are changing the way people behave by delivering exceptional experiences. Unicorn businesses have become extremely adept at exploiting experience as a mechanism to create new consumer value, and in turn, disrupt whole industries and markets.

This emerging ‘experience-first’ trend requires a focus on understanding experience; not just at a consumer level, but more broadly. Any business that is not serious about understanding experience is exposing themselves to the risk of disruption.

In the 21st century, experience arguably represents the single greatest factor in any digital transformation initiative.

“Many of the most important new companies, including Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Snapchat, Uber, Airbnb and more are winning not by giving good-enough solutions to over-served low-end customers, but rather by delivering superior experience that begins at the top of the market and works its way down until they have aggregated customers, giving them leverage over their suppliers and the potential to make outsized profits.”

Ben Thompson

Figure 1: Designing and Scaling Experience

The first most underestimated step is defining the experience. A great experience is built on a validated customer value proposition or set of propositions. The value proposition should be the anchor allowing a business to present a relevant and engaging experience.

A great experience will have been validated from both consumer and business perspectives indicating consumer acceptance and business readiness. In short, the experience has been designed to scale.

The focus on these two key factors mark out Unicorn businesses from others. Firstly, this level of commitment to defining experience means customer value has been placed at the centre of their digital strategy. Secondly, after successfully defining the experience, they work on scaling the experience. This requires the right people, processes and technology are in place.

This define-first, scale-second approach represents a radically different approach to traditional or non-digital businesses who are still looking at USPs (features) and profit motive. The new breed of Unicorn business focuses on experience and this represents a very different approach. Furthermore, very few businesses understand the value of what a superior experience will and can commercially deliver. However, those that have been disrupted know only too well that a poor experience can be extremely costly. It may even result in obsolescence.

Further reading

Here at Nomensa, we deliver UX strategies to a wide range of clients, strategies that see them compete on experience and navigate away from the challenges of comoditisation. If you would like to find out more about how we could help your organisation then give us a call on +44 (0) 117 929 7333 or submit this short form.

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About the Author

Nomensa Founder & CEO. After 20 years of dedication to digital and all things UX I have witnessed the evolution of the web from fad to defacto standard. I believe that digital experiences should feel as engaging as their analog counterparts. Great experience design allows people to bridge the digital and analog worlds seamlessly and intuitively. This is the philosophy behind Digital First.